Retail stores relying on the consumers to serve themselves have recognized the importance of displaying products near the front edge of display cartons so that the products can be readily seen by consumers and easily reached by the customers. Customers typically remove products from the front of a carton, and products remaining toward the rear of the carton may be difficult to see or to reach. This problem is aggravated by the increasing use of in-carton displays where sales may be lost if products are not visible from the front of the carton. In order to compensate for the difficulty in seeing products at the rear of a display carton or seeing those products that have fallen over to the bottom of a carton, manufactures have adopted the use of relatively short cartons, where each carton may be only a fraction of the shelf depth.
As more products are merchandised directly from cartons, there is a need for product alignment devices which provide automatic alignment of items in a display carton. It is desirable to provide effective display in a single long carton, rather than several shorter cartons. The longer cartons reduce packaging costs and retail labor.
Suppliers are using small shipper boxes to try to keep pouched products from falling into the box and disappearing from the customer's eye. The small boxes are an inefficient solution, because they require repetitive printing, and they are often lost on the shelf behind other boxes creating poor sales and inventory problems. The small boxes can not keep the product well fronted past the first few pouches.
Grocery and discount stores are cutting costs by requiring suppliers to display their products in the same shipper boxes in which the product arrived at the store, and it is desirable to provide a solution that permits effective shipment and display.